Industrial Robotics Articles, Stories & News

Harvard Apparatus has developed a new way to utilize infrared imaging technology to allow clear visualization of histological, physiological, morphological and metabolic phenomena down to the cellular level.

The Robotic Highway Safety Markers system was developed by Shane Farritor a Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Robotic Safety Barrel (RSB) replaces the heavy base of a typical safety barrel with a mobile robot. The mobile robot can transport the safety barrel and robots can work in teams to provide traffic control. Independent, autonomous barrel motion has several advantages.
First, the barrels can self-deploy, eliminating the dangerous task of manually placing barrels in busy traffic. To save costs, the robots work in teams. A more expensive "shepherd" robot with built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation would position itself precisely, and then guide the placement of less expensive units, which measure out their positions based on wheel movement (a "dead reckoning" system). In tests, the robots were able to deploy themselves just about as well as humans could place them - their big wheels let them turn on a dime.

The U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force, through the Robotics Technology Consortium, selected the Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) to deploy to Afghanistan for a first-of-its-kind military assessment. SMSS will deploy as the winner of the Project Workhorse Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) competition sponsored by the Army.

MotoSight 3D CortexVision, simplifies the use of 3D vision in robotic guidance applications. This powerful vision solution functions very similar to the human visual process. It is ideal for machine loading, product sortation and welding applications.

AV&R Vision & Robotics is proud to announce a collaborative research and development agreement with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) for the technological transfer of a non-contact three-dimension (3D) measurement system that will answer the rigorous needs of AV&R's customers in terms of precision and speed.

Per Sjöborg has a series of audio interviews with leading researchers and thinkers in the field self-reconfiguring modular robotics.
On his website Flexibility Envelope he describes the field of self-reconfiguring modular robotics as the joining two elements:
The first part is Modular robotics. This is a branch of robotics that aims to build complex systems with simple components. A bit like Lego,simple pieces are,by cooperating,capable of building complex objects.
The Second part is Self-reorganization to make the units able to move among each other on their own accord and thus reconfigure themselves from one task to another without human intervention. This also allows the system created to be active and dynamic.
His audio interviews can be found on here and are a great listen.

Servos, motors, and actuators will show significantly higher growth rates than the overall robot market, due to the increasing complexity of robots. ABI Research forecasts robotic component revenues to exceed $2.36 billion in 2016, in a total robotics market of some $22 billion.

Novotechnik U.S. introduces the Vert-X 22E Series of programmable touchless rotary sensors. These sensors use a magnetic pick up that is secured to the rotating object, so that there is no direct mechanical linkage between the shaft and the measuring system, and therefore no wear.

Birgus Latro has posted a write up and several videos looking at the Cubelets KT01 Construction Kit from Modular Robotics . This is the first production run of the Cublets and was limited to just 100 kits.
Cublets are a modular robotics kit that consists of 20 magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Each cubelet in the kit has different equipment on board and a different default behavior. There are Sense Blocks that act like our eyes and ears; they can sense light, temperature, and how far they are away from other objects.

Condition monitoring specialists SENSONICS have added a new option to their established range of proximity probes which virtually eliminates the detrimental effects on measurements caused by both side and rear targets. The PRSVBeam proximity probe has an innovative tip design which overcomes the problems associated with traditional probe designs, such as poor accuracy, system non-linearities and extended set-up time.

IEEE Spectrum has an article by Dr Massimiliano Versace about a memristor-based approach to AI that consists of a chip that mimics how neurons process information.
Researchers have suspected for decades that real artificial intelligence can't be done on traditional hardware, with its rigid adherence to Boolean logic and vast separation between memory and processing. But that knowledge was of little use until about two years ago, when HP built a new class of electronic device called a memristor. Before the memristor, it would have been impossible to create something with the form factor of a brain, the low power requirements, and the instantaneous internal communications. Turns out that those three things are key to making anything that resembles the brain and thus can be trained and coaxed to behave like a brain. In this case, form is function, or more accurately, function is hopeless without form.
Basically, memristors are small enough, cheap enough, and efficient enough to fill the bill. Perhaps most important, they have key characteristics that resemble those of synapses. That's why they will be a crucial enabler of an artificial intelligence worthy of the term.

Industrial Robotics - Featured Product

The ST Robotics Workspace Sentry robot and area safety system are based on a small module that sends an infrared beam across the workspace. If the user puts his hand (or any other object) in the workspace, the robot stops using programmable emergency deceleration. Each module has three beams at different angles and the distance a beam reaches is adjustable. Two or more modules can be daisy chained to watch a wider area. "A robot that is tuned to stop on impact may not be safe. Robots where the trip torque can be set at low thresholds are too slow for any practical industrial application. The best system is where the work area has proximity detectors so the robot stops before impact and that is the approach ST Robotics has taken," states President and CEO of ST Robotics David Sands.